Thursday, November 29, 2007

Who The Heck Is Roger Pielke Sr.?

Roger Pielke Sr. does not like to call himself a global warming denier, believing rather that CO2 is merely one of the forcings (even merely one of the human forcings) that are having an effect on recent increases in the global mean temperature, which beliefs put him within but at the conservative edge of the international consensus on the issue.

Until recently, however, Pielke Sr. ran a weblog heavily frequented by climate change deniers called "Climate Science", in which he offered his comments on recently released papers, his own and those of other researchers, pertaining to the various aspects of, well, climate science.

This site was discontinued in early September but, and here is the point of the post, it has now returned as an "information service" (comments section closed). Whatever your position on these issues, I would heartily recommend frequent visits. Pielke's personal obsessions aside, there is probably no better or more inclusive on-line source of links to/information about new papers, which are often extremely difficult to track down otherwise.

In his latest post, Pielke discusses some of the projects he and his research team have been working on lately, including:

...a preliminary poll of climate scientists, we have found that a significant minority disagree with the 2007 IPCC conclusions, either concluding that is it too conservative with respect to the risk of human-CO2 caused climate change, or overstates the relative role of this specific climate forcing.

I wrote about this survey here, where I took issue with the way Pielke and his co-authors claimed their findings demonstrated that the "science was not settled". If I were to give my own interpretation of the significance of their findings, I would say they show that:

1) within the community of climate scientists, there are no pure deniers.2) while a small minority of climate scientists believe that the IPCC conclusions "overstate the risk" of AGW, about 75 per cent believe that the effects are going to be at least as bad as the IPCC position.

Good God, you're either deluded or illiterate if you haven't read one of the IPCC reports yourself. The Summary for Policy Makers (political document) has NEVER been supported by their own scientific findings! They piss off their OWN scientists.

Thank you so much for pointing out the resurrection of the Pielke, Sr website. I enjoyed reading it immensely when it was active, and I browsed the archives occasionally since.

Pielke always has some interesting contributions on climate science issues. Because of him, I am a more nuanced AGW skeptic than before.

By the way, I'm curious how you reach the conclusion that 75% agreement with IPCC concerns about AGW constitutes "settled science." 75% is three out of four. If three out of four doctors said that eating chocolate would kill you in five years, I'd certainly be curious what the remaining one in four thought and why.